Title Yanomami, Let's Talk
Type Article
URL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/9004/
Date 2014
Citation Vilalta, Helena and Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela (2014) Yanomami, Let's
Talk. Afterall. ISSN 14654253
Creators Vilalta, Helena and Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela
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Juan Downey was an upper-middle-class
Chilean intellectual who, like most South
American intellectuals at the time,
felt strong links with Europe and had
sympathies for Cuba. Not surprisingly,
upon graduating as an architect in 1961,
he left Santiago for Madrid, Barcelona and
later Paris, and only somewhat reluctantly
did he accept, in 1965, an invitation to
go to the US, where he might have been
surprised to be considered Latin American.
Upon his arrival in Washington DC, he
experimented with all kinds of technologies
— from robots to radio waves and photo-
electric cells — to create interactive
installations and performances, which
attempted to visualise the systems of energy
that, although invisible to the naked eye,
define our physical, emotional and
ideological environments. Developed for
the US iteration of the landmark exhibition
‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, With Energy
Beyond hese Walls: A System of Two
Sculptures (1969), for example, stages
a dialogue between two sculptures and
the urban environment outside the gallery:
a roughly anthropomorphic, boxy, white
sculpture equipped with sensors translates
diferent sources of energy such as heat
or radio waves into musical tones, which
are, in turn, broadcast by an amplifier.1
As Downey began to experiment with
time-based media such as dance and video,
a technology which was just becoming
available to artists at the time, personal
interaction with these systems of energy
became increasingly pivotal to his work.
In Invisible Energy Dictates a Dance
Concert (1969), five dancers responded
to the music created by sensors placed near
the Smithsonian in Washington, whilst in
Energy Fields (1972), which he developed
after relocating to New York in 1969, a
group of dancers interacted with ultrasonic
waves in the gallery space so as to
render this energy field visible with their
movements.2
If these works helped make the
gallery walls porous to the outside world,
Downey’s experimentation with the
feedback capacity of video led him to focus
on collective forms of spiritual, emotional
and psychological energy. In hree Way
Communication by Light (1972), three
performers are each placed at the vertex
of a triangle, their faces painted white to
become the screen upon which the pre-
recorded footage of another performer’s
portrait is projected. A small mirror shows
them their transformation, while a video
monitor plays it back to the audience after
the performance is over. At the same time, a
laser beam projects yet another performer’s
voice, furthering the confusion between
the three selves. he idea of transfiguration
is taken up again in Plato Now (1973),
in which nine performers are sat in a
line, all facing the gallery wall, and are
submerged in meditation, as they listen to
pre-recorded selections of Plato’s dialogues
on headphones. he recurrence of the
quotes is regulated by their alpha waves,
or brain signals produced during intense
states of relaxation, detected by headsets of
electrodes. As in hree Way Communication
by Light, a closed-circuit television system
Artists: Juan Downey | 29
1 ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1 August—20 October 1968 and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 16 July—31 August 1969, curated by Jasia Reichardt.2 Invisible Energy Dictates a Dance Concert was performed by Carmen Beuchat, Kitty Duane, Ana Maria Fuensalida, Victoria Larraín and Titi Lamadrid at Smithsonian Associates, Washington DC, 11 August 1969. It was re-created at the Cinematheque in New York in 1970, where Graciela Figueroa responded to the movements of another six dancers, who in turn responded to the environment within the building. Energy Fields was performed by Beuchat, Trisha Brown, Caroline Gooden, Suzanne Harris, Rachel Lew, Barbara Lloyd, Gordon Matta-Clark, Penelope Newcomb, Judith Padow, Gerald Schieber and Downey at artist-run space 112 Greene Street, New York, on 21 February 1972.
Yanomami, Let’s Talk — Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Helena Vilalta
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Helena Vilalta examine Juan Downey’s work with the Yanomami against the backdrop of concurrent anthropological debates.
Juan Downey, Tushushuwaiwe or Viewpoint as Context, 1977, photo-collage including 24 black-and-white photographs, 9 × 12.5cm each. All images courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey
30 | Aterall
records the performers’ transformed
faces, broadcasting them to video monitors
placed behind their backs. Here, however,
viewers are not mere observers: their
shadows are projected onto the wall faced
by the meditators, akin to the passing
shadows that comprise ‘the prison-house
[of] the world of sight’ in Plato’s allegory of
the cave.3 In Downey’s attention to invisible
forms of energy we can recognise a similar
critique of the dominance of vision, but one
that difers radically from Plato’s idealism:
Downey’s enquiry sought to explore forms
of perception and communication that
overcame both vision and language —
forms that the artist envisaged as ‘direct
and free exchange of information more
similar to the exercise of telepathy than to
the cumbersome TV box.’4 Liberation,
Plato Now seems to suggest, will not come
from a distanced reflection upon the world
but rather from a deeper engagement
with our inner selves; it is meditation
rather than rational thought that may help
the performers-cum-prisoners break the
chains of ignorance.
Downey’s enquiry into the
transformation of the self can be seen
against the backdrop of his preoccupation
with his personal identity as a Chilean
expatriate living in the US. Allusions to
his home country recur in his work of
the period: from the unrealised project
Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert
in New York (1969), which aimed to
connect the urban environments of
Santiago and New York via satellite
technology, arguably ‘an exhortation …
“to face the music” from Chile … [in]
reference to the election of Salvador
Allende’,5 to a series of works around the
natural fertiliser Chilean nitrate, realised
in 1971, in which his interest in ecological
systems dovetails with his critique of US
chemical corporations. Perhaps seized by
the desire to ‘recover’ his South American
roots, in the early 1970s he began to
imagine the plot for a road movie of
sorts, in which he would travel from the
northernmost to the southernmost point in
the Americas, recording footage of diferent
forms of living and mythologies practiced
across the continent. In the spring of 1973,
he writes:
his automobile trip was designed to
develop an encompassing perspective
amongst the various populations which
today inhabit the American continents,
by means of a videotaped account, from
the northern cold forest to the southern
tip of the Americas — a form of evolution
in space while infolding time, playing
back one culture in the context of another
as well as the culture itself in its own
context, and finally editing all the
interactions of space, time and context
into a work of art.6
Although Video Trans Americas (1973–76)
ended up focusing almost exclusively on
Central and South America, the project
retains many of the features of this
envisaged road movie. Between the
summers of 1973 and 1974, Downey
undertook four separate trips, to Mexico
and Guatemala; Texas; Peru and Bolivia;
and Chile, often accompanied by his
family. he video diaries of these trips
were later edited in several tapes, each
associated with a specific region or locality.7
he contents of the videos range from views
of pre-Columbian architecture to images
of everyday life, folk music and artisanal
traditions, but their editing places them
apart from the observational point of view
commonly associated with ethnographic
documentaries: the camera movements,
3 Plato, The Republic (c.380 BCE, trans. Benjamin Jowett), New York: Cosimo Books, 2008, p.179.4 Juan Downey, ‘Architecture, Video, Telepathy: A Communications Utopia’ (1977), in Nuria Enguita Mayo and Juan Guardiola (ed.), Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls (exh. cat.), Valencia: Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 1998, p.34.5 James Harithas and David Ross, ‘“Offspring of My Soul”: Juan Downey’s Art of the 1960s and 70s’, in ibid., p.329.6 J. Downey, ‘Travelogues of Video Trans Americas, 1973—75’, quoted in ibid., p.330.7 These videos were later incorporated into several performances and installations, which explored the tension between the spatial continuity and the dislocation articulated in the tapes. In the performance Video Trans Americas De-Briefing Pyramid (1974), Downey suspended a dozen monitors from the ceiling to form a square, and placed another two monitors in its centre, one near to the ceiling and the other one on the floor, to create an octahedron based on the proportions of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Placed at the centre of the space, Beuchat performed a slow dance that resonated with the images of South American pyramids that Downey had recorded during his expeditions, which were broadcast to the monitors. But perhaps the most iconic and widely reproduced presentation of the series was the installation that Downey created for his exhibition ‘Video Trans Americas’ at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (4 June—4 July 1976). There Downey drew a blown-up map of South America on the gallery floor, upon which he placed two-channel versions of the footage he recorded, distributed geographically and signalling the height of each region via the height of the monitor plinths. An additional projection showed Moving (1974), a video that compiled footage from all the expeditions.
Artists: Juan Downey | 31
at times seemingly random, and the
unconventional editing, often working
upon the idea of cyclical reiteration,
signal the artist’s efort not so much to
understand another reality as to partake
in a certain cadence of life. Occasional
voice-overs, often readings from
Downey’s diaries, further situate the
videos within the artist’s personal enquiry.
he two-channel video Uros 1 & 2 (1975),
for example, in which Downey compares
the Inca ruins that he visited near Cuzco,
Peru, with the temporary dwellings built
by the Uros — pre-Incan peoples who live
in self-fashioned, floating islands on Lake
Titicaca, on the border between Peru
and Bolivia — reveals his process of
self-questioning as the journey was nearing
its end:
Like a chemical catalyst I expected to
remain identical after my video exchange
had enlightened many American peoples
by the cross-references of their cultures.
I proved to be a false catalyst when I was
devoured by the efervescence of myths of
nature and language … Only then I grew
creative and in manifold directions. Me,
the agent of change, using video to decode
my own roots. I was forever deciphered
and became a true ofspring of my soil,
less intellectual and more poetic.8
Spurred by the 1973 coup in Chile and
Allende’s death, which cut short his very
first trip to Central America, Downey at
first entertained this project as a political
contribution to a pan-South American
revolutionary identity, one marked by
the ‘clash between two beauties[:] the
conceptual structure and … politics
understood as society’s erotic survival’.9
By 1976, however, his quest was for his
own self through a deeper immersion in
primeval South America. He sought it in
Venezuela: in the summer of 1976 he set
of again to the Amazonian basin, but the
first Indian people he visited there were
the Guahibo, who were not, as he says in the
video Guahibos (1976), ‘primitive enough’.
he Yanomami, in contrast, would fit the
bill. He stayed seven months with them,
from November 1976 until May 1977,
with his wife Marilys Belt de Downey and
stepdaughter Titi Lamadrid.
•
he Yanomami (also known by many other
names such as Yanomamo, Yanomama,
Yanoama and Waiká) live on both sides
of the Venezuelan–Brazilian border. here
are around 16,000 Yanomami living in
Venezuela and 20,000 in Brazil. Because
their language (four diferent dialects
Juan Downey, With Energy Beyond These Walls: A System of Two Sculptures, 1970, colour pencil, graphite and acrylic on paper, 56 × 75cm
8 J. Downey, ‘Travelogues of Video Trans Americas, 1973—75’, in N. Enguita Mayo and J. Guardiola (ed.), Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, op. cit., p.335. Another version of this text appears in his written travelogues from May 1975. 9 Ibid., p.333.
32 | Aterall
of which are spoken) bears no relation
to any other Amazonian language and
because they are genetically very diferent
from other Amazonian Indians, the
Yanomami are considered to be quite
unique. Perhaps because of this, they have
been put, as the French have it, à toutes
les sauces. he first-hand account of the
Yanomami by Helena Valero, transcribed
by Italian doctor and anthropologist
Ettore Biocca in the book Yanoama (1965),
is one of domestic life, struggles and
hardship, but also love and respect. he
daughter of a Brazilian peasant, Valero was
abducted by the Yanomami as a young girl,
and was first married to a great leader —
the generous, humorous and valorous
Fusiwe — and then, after his death in battle,
to a lesser character. he publication of
the book in French and May ’68 coalesced
in influential anthropological debates.
hat same year, US anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins, then living in Paris in a structuralist
milieu, published the ground-breaking
paper ‘he First Aluent Society’, in which
he argued that so-called primitive societies
were not about maximising goods, but
about maximising leisure; they did not
lack goods, rather they opted to limit their
needs.10 A political version of this economic
argument came out two years later.
Similarly, based on a short stay with
the Yanomami and his own lengthy
ethnography of the Guayaki in Paraguay,
French anthropologist Pierre Clastres
elaborated an anarchist view of lowland
Amerindian societies as organised to
prevent the emergence of the state. Rather
than lacking a state structure, he argued,
their social structure actively opposed the
emergence of systems of power.
Also in 1968, the US anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon published a contrasting
account of the Yanomami, in Yanomamö:
he Fierce People, which pictured them
as sly, warlike and violent. Chagnon
later produced films such as he Axe Fight
(1975), consistent with his derogative
depiction of the Yanomami, in collaboration
with Timothy Asch, an anthropologist
and film-maker who would become
influential in the creation of the field of
visual anthropology and who went on to
author some 22 films on the Yanomami.
During that time, Chagnon met French
anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also
stayed with the Yanomami between 1968
and 1970 and was later to spend two
decades in the field, and both anthropologists
envisaged collaborating. But by 1976,
Yanomami relaxing in ceremonial attire, 1976—77. Photograph: Juan Downey
10 See Marshall Sahlins, ‘La Première société d’abondance’, Les Temps modernes, vol.268, 1968, pp.641—80.
Artists: Juan Downey | 33
when Lizot’s Le Cercle des feux (he Circle
of Fires) came out in France, his account
could hardly be more diferent from
Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanomami as
aggressive people, aligning himself instead
with Valero’s initial narrative. Chagnon’s
account was then picked up by a school
of ecological determinist anthropologists
who attributed the Yanomami’s violence
to ecological factors — a reading further
opposed by Lizot, who maintained his
cultural account, which was also consistent
with Sahlin’s and Clastres’s views.
Presumably, to this day, the Yanomami
are hardly aware that they were, and are,
fodder for ink-spilling wars, which we
do not need to delve further into. Suice
it to say that before living with the
Yanomami Downey had clearly read
both Chagnon’s and Lizot’s accounts and,
as we shall see, in his videos he adopts
one or the other anthropologist’s views
with equanimity, which is rather
surprising.
During his stay with the Yanomami,
Downey produced a vast and diverse
body of work. Informed by his practice of
meditation as well as the colours associated
with the psychedelic experiences of
the Yanomami during shamanic rituals,
he made over a hundred drawings of
circles and spirals in yellow, grey and
white, which he later also penned on
cartographic representations, as if
attempting to map the energetic fields of
the South American continent. In addition,
he also produced black-and-white photo-
graphs, photographic collages and video
footage that he later edited as single-channel
tapes as well as multi-channel installations.
Amongst these, the most enthralling
is he Circle of Fires (1979), a three-
channel video that is shown across six
pairs of monitors displayed in a circular
configuration, so that the channels are
combined in diferent permutations. he
installation shows gestures, expressions,
attitudes, gazes, body paint and body parts
such as half-faces, torsos, legs, feet and
hands, in which the actions read as a litany
of movement: grating, paddling, cutting,
knotting, throwing oneself in one’s
hammock and letting one’s hand hang
from it, lying sickly in it, delousing,
nursing, taking food to one’s mouth,
looking, singing, chanting, healing, lying
still, parading in the village, placing one’s
foot, laughing. We see fibres too, and water,
flowers, ropes, trees, leaves, bark, stones,
a mountain. And then, we hear a child
crying, the sound of water flowing, bird
cries, human voices, songs, a glimpse
at a universe of sounds. After watching
the videos, one feels able to recognise
a Yanomami just by bodily attitudes.
he single-channel video he Singing
Mute (1977–78), by contrast, is peppered
with references — are they serious, are they
mocking? — to Chagnon’s portrait of the
Yanomami as fierce people. Such ferocity
is invoked in a sequence where two young
men, one with a loaded shotgun and the
other with a bow and arrow, seemingly
threaten Downey, to which he responds
by pointing his camera, a dangerous
weapon if any. Showing no fear, the young
men lower their weapons and the episode
makes for good laughs in the village.
he film somewhat mimics a National
Geographic documentary in its choice
of topics: shamanic healing, hallucinogens
being blown into shamans' noses, visions
and even endocannibalism. hese scenes,
however, also contain subjective elements
that defy the conventional documentarian’s
veneer of objectivity. It is Downey’s
adolescent stepdaughter, for example,
who tells us about the Yanomami’s beliefs
such as the myth of origin of women,
who are thought to have been born from
a man’s pregnant leg, while in another
scene we see Downey speaking on the
phone from New York (perhaps a metaphor
for communicating with distant entities).
Further, unlike in observational documen-
taries, here the video camera and its
recordings take centre stage, both in a
confrontation with two threatening
youngsters and then when a Yanomami
crowd watch the footage of a deaf mute
who insisted on being filmed.
he Abandoned Shabono (1978)
gives us yet another picture. Or rather
two diferent pictures, since it can itself
be seen as operating on two diferent
registers. One is an account of a view
alternative to Chagnon’s portrayal of
the Yanomami, articulated through an
Downey’s interest in the idea of cyclical reiteration signals an efort not so much to understand another reality as to partake in a certain cadence of life.
36 | Aterall
interview with Lizot himself, who further
references the work of Clastres and
Sahlins. A number of readings reminiscent
of classical ethnography are displayed:
the video shows us how the shabono
(a circular, uninterrupted sequence
of hearths under a single roof, which
essentially constitutes the village) is a
microcosm of the Yanomami view of
the universe, where dramatic shamanic
performances replicate cosmology.
he map of the households within the
shabono is also a graphic version of the
Yanomami kinship system and marriage
rules, where descent is traced through
males. he video's explanation of these
kinship structures borrows freely from its
ethnographic sources: he Abandoned
Shabono chronicles how the Yanomani
form alliances through inter-village feasts,
which can often degenerate into fights;
how they oppose central power and the
chief has more duties rather than actual
power (this is Clastres); how they form a
society of leisure (this is Sahlins), spending
no more than three or four hours a day
of work time; and, last but not least,
how they consume three times the protein
they need (this is Sahlins again, opposing
ecological determinism). he corollary of
the series of traits that Downey espoused
was that the Yanomami lacked nothing in
their economic and political organisation —
rather they had chosen the good life, with
no bosses or labour duties pestering them.
One could insert this view into a longue
durée of the French philosophical tradition
that started with Montaigne in the sixteenth
century — which was itself based on
first-hand contemporary accounts of
indigenous peoples in South America.
At the same time, one may suspect
he Abandoned Shabono to be a parody
of authoritative voices, an anticipation
of the sort of critique that flooded the field
of anthropology in the US after the mid-
1980s. In contrast to his earlier work,
whose editing sought to mimic the rhythm
of life of its subjects, Downey here seems
to emphasise the trappings that connote
authority in such a setting: the interview
between Downey and Lizot, for example,
is formally staged, as if it was intended for
television broadcast, with a neatly combed
Downey wearing a jacket and tie and Lizot
answering in French, with simultaneous
translation.
Also remarkable is the sharp contrast
between Downey’s own reading of the
Yanomami and anthropological discourse,
be it Chagnon’s or Lizot’s. What struck
Downey, as is clear in the comments at the
start of the video, is the Yanomami’s sense
of impermanence: these people abandon
their villages after some time and move
elsewhere. he forest reclaims every trace
of their existence: villages, gardens and
trails disappear after a while. his was a
profound and original insight by Downey,
for indeed the Yanomami are masters in
the art of impermanence. heir dead are to
be forgotten, their names not to be uttered.
heir flesh is left to rot away, their bones
are carefully burned and their ashes,
mixed in a plantain porridge, are swallowed
by their close relatives. Only the living are
to live. Downey appeared seduced by this
sense of a revolving cycle of life and in his
subsequent video, he Laughing Alligator
(1979), he expresses a wish to be buried
inside another human body — to be
eaten up, in short. He voices this desire,
importantly, with his body painted in
the jagged striped style of the Yanomami.
Was that desire to be ‘eaten up’ by the
Yanomami to be understood as the ultimate
pursuit of an original South American
identity? It would be facile to label
Juan Downey as an illumination-seeker,
haunting so-called primitive tribes —
although in Guahibo he does state that he
is ‘looking for very pure Indians, looking
for very primitive minds’. he Venezuelan
Guahibo Indians, he said, wear pants
or dresses, and would not do — hence
the Yanomami, those ‘hard-to-find, pure
Indians’ that look like the terminus ad
quem of Downey’s quest for his ‘own
self in South America’. With such a story,
what would distinguish Downey from any
other new-age identity or wisdom seeker?
‘If I could only lean my head on your secret
vitality’, the video continues, but then he
goes on to state: ‘and let the river of our
dialogue never stop…’ his latter sentence
makes all the diference. By the end of his
Videobildung, Downey’s quest is no longer
for identity, but rather, much more wisely,
for dialogue.
‘Complex Indian nature’, he says, ‘let’s talk’.
•
If in the late 1970s Downey ofered the
Yanomami the opportunity to shoot
sequences themselves, some ten years
later, Brazilian indigenous peoples were
Artists: Juan Downey | 37
already shooting their own videos, with
the assistance of the project Video nas
Aldeias (Video in Indigenous Villages),
initiated by Vincent Carelli at the Centro
de Trabalho Indigenista (Centre for Work
with Indigenous Peoples) in São Paulo
and Brasilia.11 Since then, videos made
by indigenous peoples have become
instrumental in many ways. Some have
been used for self-representation, with long
exhaustive sequences of rituals. But they
have also been put to explicit political use,
focusing on encroachments and other
violations of indigenous rights. During the
harsh debates on indigenous rights at the
Brazilian Constitutional Assembly in 1988,
for example, Kayapo peoples were strongly
present in Brasilia, some using video
cameras to record the politicians’ utter-
ances so as to report their own version of
the disputes back to their communities.
here have been several attempts to
build a writing orthodoxy for indigenous
languages, of which more than 180 are
spoken today in Brazil: from the early
colonial Jesuit precursors to the US
evangelical missionaries from the
Summer Institute of Linguistics and New
Tribes Missions, who have more recently
outnumbered linguists and NGOs in
trying to establish and stabilise indigenous
languages’ writing with the aim of
translating and disseminating the Bible
and its teachings. Although the 1988
Brazilian Constitution mandated that
children should acquire literacy in their
mother tongue, including indigenous
languages, to this day indigenous parents
question the utility of writing in the local
language and press for more fluency in
Brazilian Portuguese. Writing in local
languages, it is felt, may undermine oral
tradition and elders’ authority. While
the politics of writing is still in debate,
indigenous youngsters have found in video
instead a much more useful and direct
medium for communication, one that
respects an oral authoritative regime and
bypasses written servitude. When viewed
against the backdrop of Downey’s work
with the Yanomami, these videos can be
seen to embody something of the artist’s
‘communications utopia’ — his longing
for a ‘diversity of signals’ that would
‘harmonise the act of perceiving with
the self’s projection onto the culture’ and
thus oppose the ‘pyramidal oppressive
hierarchy’ of the mass media. 12
11 Excerpts from the videos produced by Video nas Aldeias can be viewed online at http://www.videonasaldeias.org.br/2009/index.php (last accessed on 13 August 2014).12 J. Downey, ‘Architecture, Video, Telepathy: A Communications Utopia’, op. cit., p.347.
Children watching Juan Downey’s videos during the first Video Trans Americas journey, Santa María de los Ríos, Mexico, 1973. Photograph: Bill Gerstein